Project Description

The world’s cutest extremophile is the tardigrade, a multicellular microscopic organism found in almost every environment on earth. Also known as ‘water bears’, these little creatures can survive the dryness and cold of outer space when in their cryptobiotic state. We transferred the tardigrade proteins thought to be responsible for this amazing resilience to other organisms to see if they provided protection from desiccation. Our results suggest that these proteins could be valuable additives to bacterial cultures and protein formulations, potentially acting as a preservative during storage.

Since tardigrades are somewhere between C. elegans and Drosophila on the tree of life and have limbs, they are attractive models for studying development. We investigated how this might be achieved by using CRISPR to knock out tardigrade genes implicated in development.

Additionally, we developed a novel qPCR-based method for measuring plasmid copy number.